TORONTO — UberEats’ general manager Bowie Cheung took the stage during an afternoon breakout session at yesterday’s 2016 Canadian Foodservice Summit presented by Foodservice and Hospitality magazine and The NPD Group.
After Cheung presented a global landscape analogy of Uber and it’s growth (more than one billion rides and more than one million drivers), he delved into the UberEats service the impact it’s had on the foodservice industry.
“It’s not just that it’s growing —it’s growing exponentially,” he said. “We’re in 17 markets on four continents. We started in Los Angeles and we put some salads and burgers in some cars and people were buying them. So, we built technology around this growing demand.”
During his presentation, Cheung enlightened the audience with a different view of the UberEats operation, saying most users of the service view UberEats as a quick and easy way to get food from restaurants which don’t normally offer delivery. He gave several examples of restaurants able to grow business and customer base because of UberEats by side-stepping the challenge of paying delivery drivers.
“It makes cities smarter, operating more intelligently. It creates more flexible hours for our driver partners, with spiking demand at the different times of the day. It improves the speed, cost and reliability for our users, so that our users are not just riders. It’s also about the restaurants, small- and medium-sized businesses and enterprises. This gets us really excited — the growing of our customer base,” he said.
Cheung also examined the UberEats drivers themselves, explaining how drivers can choose to be either Uber or UberEats drivers and can be paid by the distance they drive. He also said a growing number of UberEats drivers are women because they feel safer delivering food than driving strangers around late at night.
Cheung closed with an optimistic view of Uber and UberEats’ future and implied that as long as the company keeps embracing the newest trends, it will not only survive, but thrive. “At the root of it, we’re a technology company,” he said.
